Clusty is now "Wii Friendly"
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
We have just added a new project to Clusty Labs - the completely "Wii Friendly" Clusty Wii. Clusty is uniquely suited for searching on the Wii because the text entry with the soft keyboard on the Wii is very slow. With our topical clusters, you're able to use shorter queries and just navigate with the clusters to get the results you're searching for. If you want a user guide for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, for example, just type "zelda strategy" and click on the "Twilight Princess" cluster and you're off and running.
Searching the web with the Wii is not without its problems though. The first problem we encountered when searching with Clusty was that our default font is way too small. After bumping up the font size, we started to think of what else we could do to make it possible to search from your couch without ever having to zoom in.
Designed from the ground up to address the various issues with searching using the Wii Internet Channel, Clusty is now completely "Wii Friendly". Here's an overview of the design considerations that went into Clusty for the Wii.
Result and Cluster rollover effects
The Wii-mote is not as precise as a mouse on a desktop computer, so we made the results and clusters have a large clickable region and clear rollover effects.
When you hover over a document or a cluster, you can clearly see when you're correctly positioned over a clickable link. When you use the Wii-mote, you can also hear and feel the rollover, so you know you're in the right place.
Search box submits instantly upon entering text
Using JavaScript, we capture the text change event and automatically submit your query. This way, you just have to enter your search text with the full-screen soft keyboard and hit "OK" - no need to hit the "Search" button too.
Simplified clusters
We've decreased the maximum length of the clusters to keep them closer to one line and removed the ability to expand the cluster tree. When you're browsing with the Wii, patience is limited and screen real estate is at a premium, so we made the compromise to have big visible clusters rather than an expandable cluster tree.
Simplified results
As with the clusters, we've streamlined the search results to save space and make the text as large as we could without sacrificing vertical space.
And that's it! When you go to Clusty with your Wii, you will automatically see the new "Wii Friendly" interface, but you are also able to use the Wii "skin" by going directly to wii.clusty.com. If there's something else you think we could do to make searching with your Wii easier, let us know!
Clusty redesigns with focus on speed and simplicity
Monday, October 2, 2006
Today marks the 2nd birthday and the first major redesign of Clusty since its launch. If you are a regular to Clusty, you'll probably notice the design update, but this isn't just a facelift - we overhauled the back-end to make a significant speed improvement and also added a number of new interface features.
Redesign
With the new design, we had the following goals:
- Improve the speed
- Make the interface cleaner and simpler (useit.com)
- Highlight the clusters
After numerous design iterations, we came up with the current interface. Take a look at the following screenshots for comparisons (click on the screenshots for full size images):
New Features
Along with the new visual design, we took the opportunity to add some additional interface features:
More Tab
The list of Clusty tabs at the top now has a "more" link that expands to reveal the additional Clusty services. You can also customize your tabs to show only the services that you use most often.
Font Size Selector
Bringing the power to the people, you can now control the font sizes of Clusty with a click of a button. You'll find the font selector right below the clusters on the left:
Find in Clusters
Sometimes you know a result is in there somewhere, but even the clusters aren't doing the trick. Now Clusty has a "find in clusters" feature where you can search within the result set (for the advanced users, try searching with a regular expression!).
Clusty Labs
Clusty has always been an innovation platform for our enterprise search product, and with the opening of our own
Labs, we now have a home for those projects that may not fit under the basic Clusty umbrella. Clusty Labs gives us the opportunity to create more niche products that may have a smaller audience or to experiment with unique implementations of our search and clustering platform. We've moved our Benjamin Franklin portal into Clusty Labs along with our recently-developed Shakespeare Searched site.
Clusty Cloud
The Clusty Cloud is our version of a tag cloud. The advantage of the Clusty Cloud is that you can create a cloud based on any query - not just a site's tags. Each link is a cluster generated by the Clusty search engine. The larger font sizes indicate more popular themes for the given query.
No sign-up necessary - just use the Clusty Cloud Creator to create your own cloud in 3 easy steps.
